The revival of Macondo
A writer breathes new life into a town immortalised in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Review: The Mompós Project, Richard McColl, by Gavin O'Toole
The Mompós Project: A Tale of Love, Hotels and Madness in Colombia, Richard McColl, 2025, Fuller Vigil
If you can identify a single predominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the masterpiece by Gabriel García Márquez that has arguably had the greatest influence on world literature of any novel in our lifetimes, it is about embracing our fate.
Richard McColl, an intrepid, adventurous journalist, has certainly done so since setting foot many years ago in Santa Cruz de Mompox, commonly known as Mompós, in the Bolívar department of northern Colombia.
It’s probably a coincidence that, according to many people, Mompós was the inspiration for García Márquez’s fictional town of Macondo—but for McColl it has certainly been a fortuitous coincidence.
Now a hotelier, writer and academic with—among other things—a publishing imprint and podcast to his name, McColl’s own story seems to capture well the universal truths in Gabo’s epic novel about overcoming isolation, the yearning for connection, and our need to confront with good humour the inevitability of life’s challenges.
He has resolved all three through his dedication to the restoration of several dilapidated colonial buildings in what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that, among other things, he has helped to put on the map.
He tells his tale in The Mompós Project with the disposition of a natural raconteur, and you can just picture him sipping beers and entertaining guests on the steamy balcony of his Casa Amarilla hotel as you make your way effortlessly through his book.
It is a form of travel writing devoted to one place in the swampy inland tropics on the Magdalena River in which our protagonist paints a vivid picture of the town, its history, its people, and his own role there as one of just two resident “gringos”.
A Londoner now settled in Colombia with his wife Alba and their children, McColl recreates the struggle to get things done in the atmosphere of torpor created by a heat that shapes the nature of priorities, relationships and even time itself among his fellow momposinos.
“Is it a case of mad dogs and Englishmen?” he asks. “Well, you’ll not find me wandering the streets in the midday heat unless in an absolute emergency, and even the stray dogs, or perros chandosos, know how to keep to the shady side of the street.”
It is a place above all, says McColl, where one feels the weight of history, and for a small town there’s plenty of it.
Founded in 1539, it played a key role in the Spanish colonisation of northern South America, and became, on 6 August 1810, the first town in Colombia to declare independence from Spain. Simón Bolívar duly arrived, and there in 1812 recruited 400 men to join his army of liberation.
Recounting the travails of restoration in a colonial ruin, McColl finds himself following in the footsteps of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes’ In Tuscany.
But it was a vignette plucked from the pages of García Márquez that fired the challenge of setting up a guesthouse, which led him to purchase first, one, and then, finally, a total of four dilapidated colonial houses.
In doing so, the author battled the lethargy induced by the climate and way of life that had left the town in a wilful state of decay for so long it felt like the locals had little pride left in their home. McColl’s unique advantage? An eye for opportunity.
The author writes: “I came and saw an opportunity for business and the possibility of helping the town. However, if it hadn’t been me, there would have been another intrepid soul looking to spearhead the foreign invasion of Mompós.”
The writer explores what it really means to be a “gringo” and provides unique insights into political culture, including the hierarchical, regional and bureaucratic character of Colombian society which can create “a tangle of priorities and confused identities leading to conflict and uneasiness”.
He muses about what Bolívar—the great liberator himself—would have made of the development of today’s Mompós, from which he launched the epic liberations of Nueva Granada and Venezuela.
It is clear from the enthusiasm that comes through this book that McColl finds joy as a journalist in Colombia uncovering forgotten tales and histories and is intrigued by his esteemed predecessors, not least British immigrants to Colombia.
These included the coal miner’s son, Jack Greenwell, who became a successful football coach in Spain and Peru; William Lidstone of Kingsbridge, Devon, who built the Estación de la Sabana railway station in Bogotá; the regally named Plantagenet Moore, who opened the first gold mines in Marmato, Caldas; and no less than Robert Stephenson—of the Stephenson Rocket Train family—who helped set up the silver mines in Tolima with Cornish miners.
We also gain an insight into McColl’s own route map, initially as a freelance journalist but then graduating to academic and finally postgraduate work in conflict resolution.
The author provides brave insights into the nature of paramilitary and guerrilla activity in the environs of Mompós, a subject that he addresses with sensible caution. He states unequivocally that he does not sympathise with the guerrillas, but understands how, upon closer investigation, they can appeal to humble folk with few options who yearn for a mere minimum of social progress.
“Think about Colombia as a whole,” he writes, “and, really, if we take most of the countryside, it’s all the same. There’s a lack of interest or will, a lack of resources, a lack of communication and a lack of understanding from the central government towards the plight of the countryside.”
There seems little doubt that McColl has made a positive contribution to Mompós but also in his own way, it has to be said, to Colombia, as a hotel owner who has worked tirelessly to build up national and international tourism almost from scratch.
This book captures the pioneering spirit of a man eager to roll up his sleeves at a critically important moment of transition in his adopted land.
One sign of that transition is the degree to which Colombia’s authorities have in recent years recognised the real value to tourism of the heritage of Mompós and directed resources to its restoration.
But McColl identifies himself above all else as a writer, addicted to his subject: “Mompós has captivated my imagination since 2007 and everything about the town is literary and almost beckoning me to put pen to paper.”
In that respect, he possesses the gift that all accomplished scribes possess the world over—he is clearly a man of the people, at ease with those around him.
Full of humour and radiating the warmth of his fascination, this book celebrates the timeless character of the indomitable Brit wherever his adventures take him.
McColl is truly lucky to have found Mompós—but Mompós is probably luckier still to have found McColl.
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